Of course it is..!   Most of the best ideas are..! 

All new ideas owe something to old ideas

The Oasis Cities concept is inspired by some old and some newer ideas

Paolo Soleri’s ARCOLOGIES

Ebenezer Howard’s GARDEN CITIES

Paul Romer’s CHARTER CITIES

Israel’s KIBBUTZIM

INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES

Walled MEDIEVAL CITIES

CRUISE SHIPS & RESORT HOTELS

All these concepts have their drawbacks and limitations.

Paolo Soleri’s ARCOLOGIES are far too enormous to be practical.  GARDEN CITIES, with their expansive “green spaces”, are too low density.   CHARTER CITIES (as proposed by Romer) would have open borders and populations in the millions, like Hong Kong.  KIBBUTZIM lack personal privacy.  INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES tend to be religion -based communes.  MEDIEVAL  CITIES  were compact and defensible, but very unsanitary.  CRUISE SHIPS & RESORT HOTELS are pleasure palaces for short-term vacations, not designed for living and working in.   

“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who dismiss Oasis-Cities as an “old idea” are implying that “since nothing ever came of those ideas, nothing will come of yours”.  In short, a sneering put-down by unimaginative curmudgeons.   Whether or not an idea has been “thought of before” is irrelevant since flying machines, and countless other inventions and innovations, were all “thought of” centuries before they became a reality.  

OA-Cities will be nothing like the dystopian “city in a giant building” depicted in sci-fi movies (e.g., “Blade-runner”) – or the fanciful (but never to be built) “futuristic projects” portrayed on “Impossible Engineering” type TV docs.  By REDUCING the number of buildings in a city from 100’s of thousands (of many different shapes, sizes, and purposes) to just a few dozen awe-inspiring edifices – each one set amidst an arcadian sanctuary of gardens, ornamental lakes and bucolic woodland – OA-Cities will enormously simplify infrastructure and services provision.

There is much more to this idea than the actual building, impressive as that is.  The Oasis City concept addresses COMMUNITY, CONSERVATION, CRIME, ECONOMICS, ESTHETICS, and so on. 

“SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE SMART CITY..!” (says Yogi Bear)

Or, to paraphrase a 1960’s UK TV late-night show…

“NOT SO MUCH A CITY, MORE A NEW WAY OF LIFE”     

Someone whose best “argument” is the sneeringly dismissive “old idea” – is blind to what a huge improvement OA-Cities will be over monotonous, sprawling, inefficient, time-wasting, and increasingly crime-plagued OBeCities.

The nay-sayers are right – it is an “Old Idea”…

The idea of a “city within a building” was hypothesised by HG Wells in “The Sleeper Awakes” (1899) where the protagonist awakes after a 200 year sleep (i.e. around 2100) to find that England’s cities and towns had all been replaced by a few “stupendous hotels”.   Wells did not describe what these “hotels” might have looked like except, predictably enough, they were very unpleasant places ruled by a despot who employed thuggish Nigerian mercenaries to stifle dissent.  

The idea of a “City within a huge building” has cropped up in a number of sci-fi books and movies where they are, as always, depicted as dystopian over-crowded “human hives” inhabited by frightened people who are ruled over by a tyrant and his sadistic “Nazi-style” enforcers.      

The most famous advocate of the 3-D city concept was Paolo Soleri (1919-2013) – an Italian-American philosopher-architect who coined the term “Arcology” in his 1969 Magnum Opus – “Arcology, the City in the Image of Man”.   

Soleri’s Arcologies were fantastically ginormous, typically intended to house hundreds of thousands or even millions of inhabitants.   To illustrate the scale of his intricately hand-drawn Arcology designs, Soleri would superimpose an outline of the Empire State Building, as can be seen in his Babelnoah design.  

“Babelnoah” – the Empire State Building (for scale comparison) is the tiny stick on the right

After a brief flirtation with fame in the 1970’s Soleri and his overly-ambitious ideas (and rather frugalistic philosophy) were soon forgotten.  Today, not one of the big players in the “save the planet” environmental movement are talking about Arcologies.  Very possibly, most have never even heard of the concept.  Given all the hullaballoo about “global warming/climate change” – one might have expected that the idea of “Arcologies” would have been resurrected, even if on a much smaller scale than Soleri had in mind.  Strangely enough it hasn’t happened – at least not YET..!   

Where is it written that an "Arcology", in order to qualify as one, must be fantastically enormous?

Perhaps Arcologies are NOT being considered (as a possible solution to e/v issues) because Soleri’s Arcologies were far too enormous and therefore impractical in engineering and financial terms.?   Therefore, it is important to make the distinction between Soleri’s (frankly impossible) Arcologies, and my concept of realistically-scaled Oasis Cities